Ruth Ann S. Basnillo                                                                                                                                7/8/2008

SYSANAL

O0C

CRAIG NEWMARK

Founder, craigslist

Story:

            It was in 1995 when Craig Newmark started sending out notices about cool events in San Francisco to his friends. It came to a point wherein more people wanted to be added on the list and started calling it “Craig’s List.” Soon, suggestions called for listing stuffs related to jobs and sales. In late 1995, as Craig’s List grew in popularity, Newmark wrote Perl Code using Pine as his database tool to turn his email logs into web pages. And that’s when he switched from a mailing list into a website and added more categories, still without knowing that he’s already into a classified ad business already. At the end of 1997, he was getting about one million page views a month and at that point Microsoft Sidewalk offered him to run banner ads which he didn’t accept. In the 1998/1999 timeframe, they thought of charging for something and they stucked to the suggestion of charging job ads and landlords or apartment brokers. In 1999, Newmark decided to turn craigslist into a real company. During that time, he was into another startup but he left it for craigslist. Jim Buckmaster joined on as lead programmer and CTO in early 2000. After realizing he’s not a good manager, he promoted Buckmaster to become the CEO after a year who really did a great job, and Newmark’s title became Customer Service Rep and Founder. He managed to keep all listings free except for the help wanted ads in selected cities and broker apartment listings in New York City. Several companies offered acquisition but they were politely turned down by Newmark except for eBay which purchased equity from a former employee of craigslist. It still continues to expand and now has sites for over 300 cities worldwide.

THREE THINGS I LEARNED:

            Craigslist is really a company where much moral values will be got. First, I learned that dedication to your mission should always apply to everything you’re doing. A very specific example is Newmark and how he started his company. Before the idea of craigslist was begotten, its founder was already into his mission of evangelizing the benefits of Internet and building a community on it. With that, he held fast to his plan of keeping craigslist as free as possible as soon as it was started up. And until now, he was able to resist the temptation of charging for it. That’s how he was really dedicated to his mission.

            Next, I learned that if you’re into being an entrepreneur, you need to learn the essence of listening not only to the dictates of greedy people about how you can earn more money in a wrong way but to the suggestions of your product users. Craigslist succeeded as a company because they listened to their customers’ suggestions, figured out what seemed to make sense, and they did it. They succeeded because they do things almost 100 percent based on what people ask them to do.

            Lastly, I learned that the most important part of a startup’s culture is the culture of trust and the moral compass. According to Newmark, it’s always better to trust instincts and moral compass when thinking of starting a company. He gave this as his good advice because he had already experienced to trust some people whom, his instincts were telling him were untrustworthy and in some cases proved to be true. Sometimes, it’s about not trusting our instincts that make us regret afterwards.